Just a few more days until the start of this year’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, to be held in Atlanta from Nov. 14-17. We’re excited to see y’all in our fair city! A lot will go on next week, so we thought we’d put out some signposts about where you can find us, what we’re doing, and what we want to show you while you’re there.

Where you can find us and what we want to show you: We’re piling in to booth #1762, where we’ll be showing everything we’re working on to reinvent the television experience. That means:

The Videoscape Experience: “Videoscape” incorporates cloud, network and client devices to drive new video experiences over traditional and Internet-based networks. That means freeing viewers from the traditional bounds of time, place and platform, towards the realities of anytime, anywhere, any screen.

Specifically, we’ll demonstrate the integration of linear, on-demand and over-the-top content, with our Media Suite – a full lifecycle content management system, for both managed and unmanaged (consumer-purchased) devices. As in set-tops, soft clients, Internet TVs, tablets, smart phones, you name it.

Also on hand: Ways to distribute media inside and outside the home, using our Media Gateway family of products, as well as our “Conductor” – a standards-based, real-time network and device management tool designed specifically for service providers. Read More »

Guests for the weekend? Move the TV to the guest room. Wish you could have three TVs to follow this weekend’s games? Go for it. With this no new wires solution, the “plumbing” is no longer an issue.

We Cisco people call it our ISB7005 wireless set-top box and our VEN401 wireless access point. One is a set-top that can be located anywhere in the house; the other is a video-optimized wireless access point. Read More »

This is my last blog. Well, last blog as a guy focused on the video service provider segment. A few weeks ago, I accepted a role within Cisco to lead our Service Provider Mobility marketing efforts for our rapidly growing mobility business.

Almost immediately upon telling people of my move, the ribbing began: “Challenge junkie!” “You just can’t get enough, can you?” And so on.

I suppose it’s true. I spent the last four years helping to craft a vision and product portfolio for IP video. First, we called it “3rd wave of Video”, knowing we were onto something big.

When we finally got our arms and our engineering resources around it, we gave birth to something magical that we call “Videoscape.” It’s an umbrella term for everything that’s required to successfully transition to IP video – from Media Data Centers, to CDNs, to gateways, and everything in between.

Last week, in fact, we strengthened that portfolio even more with our acquisition of BNI Video – a group of entrenched cable veterans who will significantly augment our ability to provide CDN analytics, as well as session and process management for end points seeking IP video.

So, it’s an exciting time to be transitioning, and I remain fully and enthusiastically committed to those budding realities.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about my colleague Scott Puopolo, who will present at the CDN World Summit in London. In his keynote, Scott will give a detailed look at a first-ever pilot of an open CDN federation trial that British Telecom, KDDI, Orange, SFR and Telecom Italia participated; we anticipate more service providers to join the effort within the coming weeks and months.

Meanwhile, and along the same lines, our own François Le Faucheur took the initiative to volunteer his time and efforts as co-chair of a new IETF working group, the CDN Interconnect (CDNI), to flesh out the critical technology components and direction for federated CDNs. (Well done, Francois!). You can find a recent post by Francois on his IETF standards work here.

Federated CDNs optimized for video are important because of the explosion in IP devices capable of displaying video, and the corresponding tsunami of video traffic flowing into those devices. Service provider CDNs fulfill a unique role in enabling a high QoE for rich media services on a global footprint , but they’ll not go far enough if they’re not interconnected.

This is all about creating a market, and it’s happening. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the critical enabler in all of this – our Cisco CDS, as part of the Videoscape portfolio, which is comprised of both a business and technology architecture for IP video to flourish. In other words, it’s not just a product play.

This is why you won’t want to miss that keynote. It’s an exciting (understatement) and important milestone in the migration to all-IP, in general, and IP video, in specific. For me, it’s a validation of the work we’ve done for so long to advance the B2B2C promise of Videoscape. Happy trails!

Last week at IBC 2011, Cisco announced several examples of how we are implementing Cisco Videoscape™ with International Service Providers. Cisco Videoscape is a service provider solution that lets consumers bring together content from pay TV, online, and on-demand sources to create a truly immersive TV experience on any device.

If it’s September and you’re visiting Amsterdam, there’s a good chance you’re attending the International Broadcasters Conference or IBC. As the main global show involved with the production AND delivery of video, it seems that the vast majority of people on my plane were involved with encoding, decoding, or transporting video. The result is a techno-invasion of nearly 50,000 people in a medium sized city, cramping hotels, restaurants, roads, and the RAI convention center. Think of it as a physical metaphor for the video wave that is coming… Read More »

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